FRAPS vs MSI Afterburner

As I'm sure most of the veteran members know: FRAPS is the most commonly used way to record video games, but not the best. I didn't design some elaborate graph, but I do have two videos on this subject:

A simple side-by-side comparison of FRAPS and MSI Afterburner: Two programs that capture video, one of which is also a GPU overclocking utility. FRAPS is a paid program, Afterburner is free.

And I have a video demonstrating the installation and basic set-up of Afterburner for video recording. Videos in spoilers.

Pasting your video info would have helped better than a video I'll give MSI Afterburner recorder a shot later this week.

Comparison of two video capture programs: performance and quality in various factors:

It may be hard to tell with the videos cascaded (best i could do overnight, sorry) but FRAPS had significantly lower FPS. notice reloads, when i got shot on the roof, and anytime I turned quickly: FRAPS would drop to below 10 FPS (notice stuttering.)

Afterburner remained nearly perfect the entire time. Both programs displayed "pausing", though Afterburner paused less often and was quicker to recover.__________________

THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS REFER TO RECORDING BEING SET TO 30 FPS (Not the 45 FPS set in video.) the game would play at 30 FPS in FRAPS, 80-100 FPS in Afterburner.

Afterburner has the edge on 30FPS recording rates, as well as recorded 45 (my stress point.)____________________Also, Afterburner is even more smooth (on my rig) when set to MJPG encoding, but I decided to use RTV1 encoding for fairness of comparison.

A 2 minute FRAPS video: 3.93GB @1080pA 30 minute Afterburner video: 10.1GB @ 1080p_________________That is 2GB/m FRAPS filesize, and 0.33 GB/m Afterburner size.In disk usage: MSI also had the edge._________________Disk load recovery:FRAPS would stay stable for long periods. but if I stopped recording and re-enabled: FRAPS would have severe performance issues. I would be required to restart my entire computer: As the hard drives were thrashing and seemingly never stopped.

Afterburner: Had issues if run during the problem period created by FRAPS in above paragraph: But if run alone (not shortly after FRAPS) I easily recorded a 30 minute continuous match without any slowdown. I could toggle recording by spamming the hotkey to no effect on my performance.

All-in-all: through a full night's testing; Afterburner won test after test. I had some severe issues with it: But only because I would swap from FRAPS to Afterburner in a given game: And FRAPS had bogged me down. If I did not load FRAPS, and only used Afterburner: It didn't give me one single issue.

So what this means is: As long as your hard drives aren't under intense load before you start recording: Afterburner will treat you right. For me, 30 FPS was perfection. Had virtually no hit on my FPS or input lag. Pushing to 45 FPS recordings however began to stress my system: Though less than FRAPS did at 30 FPS recordings.

MSI is the clear winner in all areas. It even looks better (That purple swirling icon, top-left of screen is the recording indicator. Shows nothing when not recording.

BOTH programs recorded to the same drive that Battlefield 3 was loaded off of: To show results similar to most rigs (single HDD.) FPS is always going to be better when recording if you use 3: one for OS, one for game, one for video capture.

Yeah I considered that, but many people consider FRAPS as much a benchmark tool (FPS counter) as a video recording program. I had initially planned to make graphs of their performance, but was busy with other things while trying to do this: So instead had just made a video of the two with a few easily written down statistics in the description (and end of video.)

So while not recorded and marked as a benchmark should it, it is intended as a "simple" benchmark, more visually than numbers based though: As graphs just weren't in the timeline.

-PS: Thanks AGNguyen for pasting that in. I should've done it, appreciate you putting that in there for me. Been busy lately (hence not spamming forums as much lol.)